Sometimes when they touch, it's all a bit too much

   

I would expect some pretty big fallout if someone in a Canadian workplace routinely called a co-worker “Fatty.” Or nicknamed them Chino because they had a bit of an Asian look to their features.

    But for the most part, such things don’t seem to rile the average Honduran. I mentioned to one of my co-workers this week that if she ever came to Canada, it was probably best not to call anybody “Fatty” – Gordito – as she had just done while summoning a chubby co-worker. She and the so-called Gordito both looked surprised to hear that such a nickname could be construed as offensive. Gordito himself noted that sure, a nickname like that might cause offence if said the wrong way. But if said in a friendly voice – hey, what was the big deal?

    It got me thinking yet again about cultural differences. A good part of what I see around me in the workplace would be interpreted as harassment in Canada, or at least as “unacceptable practices.” Yet if the other party not only tolerates it but appears to be perfectly relaxed and happy with whatever is being said or done, what then?

    The Hondurans I've met don’t seem to have the same sensitivity around body image that so many North Americans do, which perhaps explains why rather blunt comments related to their appearance don’t seem to rile them. I sense that they accept themselves as they are much more readily, and don't have the crazy thinking patterns so common in my land that if you could only change your physical appearance, everything about your life would be better. 

    So while I quietly wish they'd quit calling each other Fatty, Skinny, Liar and other impolite nicknames, who is it that actually has the problem if I’m the only one taking offence? I've drawn the line at using such nicknames myself, of course, but I'm also trying to stop taking offence on someone's behalf every time I hear such things, given that they show no signs of being offended themselves.

    Then there’s the kind of touching that goes on in the workplace, which is way beyond a modern-day Canadian’s tolerance level. I’ve seen my co-workers – single and married alike - give each other back rubs, lay a hand on each other’s thighs, even cuddle up beside each other on a bed.

    Sometimes we’ll be in the middle of a meeting and one person will come up behind a co-worker and wrap their arms snugly around the person’s waist. The two of them might stay that way for 10 or 15 minutes of the meeting. And we're not talking about a licentious group of people here; my co-workers are deeply religious.

    More than a year and a half on, I’m still quite freaked out by the intimate touching that goes on in broad daylight by people who work together. But I've come to see by the calm and welcoming expressions of the people being touched that in fact, the problem is mine. Nobody but me seems to be troubled by any of it (although I suspect spouses might object were they to show up at work unexpectedly and catch an on-the-job cuddle in progress). And no one is touching me, given that I'm much older than any of them and emitting a prickly don't-even-think-about-it energy.

    I don’t doubt that such touching begets sexual harassment, a concept that my Honduran co-workers are not yet familiar with. I’m sure there are Honduran bosses out there who are taking much advantage of the practice of intimate touch in the workplace, and unhappy employees whose faces are not showing the same calm acceptance that I see among my own cuddly co-workers.

    But perhaps that's a conversation for another day here in Honduras. My co-workers, male and female alike, look at me like I’m some old prude on the rare occasions when I mention that people sure do touch each other a lot more intimately in the workplace than we do back in my land, and call each other rather cruel names that could get you slapped with a harassment suit in a heartbeat in a lot of Canadian workplaces. The people I work with truly see nothing inappropriate in what they’re doing. 

    Chalk it up to cultural differences. I envy Hondurans for being comfortable enough in their own skins that being called Fatty doesn't rile them, but I do wonder where all that workplace touching will lead. Give me a clear no-touch policy any day.  

Worry: There's no escape

   

Long, slow drives to distant communities are opportunities for interesting conversations with my co-workers, as there’s often just me and one of the guys in the truck. We've talked about workers’ rights, Canadian salaries, time management, trades training, attitudes toward homosexuality – you name it.

    “Why do so many people in Canada and the U.S. use drugs?” asked a co-worker last week during one such conversation. Hoo-boy, I thought to myself. Tough question.

    Making a living in the illegal-drug business is something a significant number of Hondurans are intimately familiar with, but there’s not much of a culture (yet) of using drugs and alcohol. Could be the lack of money, could be the Christianity. But it also strikes me that Hondurans just don’t have the drive to experience an altered state in the same way that those of us from privileged countries do.

    I speculated that people in my country just seemed a little more anxious and stressed-out about things, and that they use drugs and alcohol to take the edge off. I think my co-worker was a bit baffled by the idea that people would feel anxious even when they've got 10 times the resources and options that a typical Honduran has. We got to talking about whether there’s a certain amount of worry that people need in their lives.

    If you’re a typical Honduran, you might fill your worry quotient with fears about growing enough food for the off-season, paying your child’s school tuition next month, getting that festering wound on your leg looked at even though you have no money for medical care or transport to the clinic. You’d worry about your day-to-day job, being extorted by thugs on your morning bus ride, how to keep your teenage son from getting killed by the narco-traficantes he has taken up with.

    Few people from a country like mine have those kind of problems. But they might be worrying about where their life’s going, or whether they should quit their job. They wonder if their spouse still loves them. If they've got enough money for retirement. If they're living life to the max. If their children are happy.

    So we're all worrying, but about very different things. Managing problems through drugs and alcohol isn solution for any kind of worry, but I would think that it’s a lot better of a fit with anxiety-type worries in a middle-class country than it is with basic issues of survival. There’s just no margin for error when you live as close to the edge as so many Hondurans do.

    A middle-class Canadian misusing drugs or alcohol will eventually pay the price by way of risking their job, family, hard-earned savings and self-respect, but most of us could go years and years before anything bad actually happened. A campesino who takes up alcohol as a way out of his farming troubles puts his life and that of his family at immediate risk.

    Would my co-worker understand the developed world’s healthy appetite for drugs and alcohol if I told all of this to him? I don’t think I have the words to explain middle-class angst and anxiety to people who have never had the luxury of getting past survival. 

    I don’t know whether my co-worker feels heartened to learn that even when people have the life he wishes he had, they still have things that weigh heavily on their minds. But so it goes. And so the drugs move from south to north, adding a few more worries at both ends as they pass through. 

Microorganismo de Montana: The Movie

    Oh, we talk a lot about the importance of organic agriculture back home, but would we climb up a 75-degree slope into a beautiful but buggy mountain forest and dig around in the dead leaves for a couple of hours looking for flecks of white fungus?
    That's how a couple of my favourite Copan coffee producers passed a big part of their day last week, collecting the microorganismo de montana that is used by organic growers in Honduras to make a special fertilizer known for helping plants of all kinds arm themselves against diseases and infestations.
    The fruits of the men's labour are now tucked away tightly in a 45-gallon barrel. The microorganisms will be dining on molasses and rice semolina for the next 15 days, and multiplying like crazy in an anaerobic environment.
    When the mix is uncapped later this month, the result will be a barrelful of natural microorganisms ready to enrich the soil around the producers' coffee plants. That kind of preventive care is always important, but it's critical right now as the producers head into the second of three tough years of losses due to a persistent coffee fungus (the infected plants are either having to be cut back almost to the soil or torn out and the land replanted, either of which results in three years without a coffee crop as the fincas are rebuilt.
    Here's my video of that day that explains how it's done. I've made versions in English and Spanish - clic aqui para la version espanol.
    

If PEERS was a person, I guess I'd call this love

Find the newsletter at http://www.peers.
bc.ca/images/PEERS_Newsletter_0913.pdf

   

    I can’t think of many former employers that I would happily continue to work for without pay. But PEERS Victoria is clearly one of them, seeing as it’s been six years since I finished my time there as executive director and yet I still threw my hand up with genuine enthusiasm last month when asked to put together PEERS’ latest newsletter.

   What is it about the place that has caused this permanent attachment? 

    Part of it is the passion I feel for doing something that gets us thinking about how we judge and marginalize sex workers. Another big part is the amazing, resilient and loving people I have met over the years because of my association with PEERS and sex work – both the people come for services and those who come to work or volunteer there. A lot of us appear to be bonded to the place for life.

   But the other thing that ties me to PEERS is that after spending three years observing its grassroots model in action, I’m a believer. PEERS was created by and for sex workers, and in its best moments it is capable of amazing work. When things are going right at PEERS, you really feel the power of grassroots action to change lives.

   Things are not exactly going right at PEERS in this moment, unfortunately. The great staff and volunteers are still there – many of them the same ones I worked with during my time at PEERS – but the resources to run the place aren’t. (Read an earlier blog of mine here to understand more about how the current financial situation came about.)

   PEERS has had to give up its daytime drop-in, its group programs, and all the many community connections that have grown out of that vital work. Outreach services continue, and that’s a very good thing, but the drop-in and group programs were the all-important next steps for many outreach clients.

   Harm-reduction and referral services directly on Victoria’s stroll are obviously very important for the vulnerable, street-entrenched women who are frequent PEERS clients. But to no longer have the next step – the services that support people who need outreach first but then are ready for bigger changes in their lives – well, that’s a cruel folly.

   To no longer have one safe, judgment-free place where sex workers can go, in whatever shape they are in on a particular day, gives the lie to all that hand-wringing we did after the Pickton trial revealed just how complicit we all are in creating the conditions for murder.

   Vast sums were spent on Pickton’s prosecution and an inquiry into those horrible, shameful years in B.C. - $102 million on the trial, almost $8 million on the inquiry. For that kind of money, PEERS Victoria could run its day programs and drop-in for the next 366 years. And what did all that spending result in for the province’s sex workers? Fewer services. PEERS Vancouver closed last year, and PEERS Victoria is struggling to hold on. As they go, nobody else is stepping up to do this specialized type of work. (The 2012 inquiry is titled "Forsaken." Fitting.)

   I hope you’ll check out the newsletter, and consider passing it on to others who might want to know more about this situation or have ideas for new funding sources for PEERS Victoria.

   About $300,000 a year would restart the drop-in and day programs. On the one hand, that’s not much. On the other, that’s way beyond bake sales and car washes. While individual donations are always welcome at PEERS, what I’m wishing for is that someone within government who cares about the issue will step up quietly to guide the way to a good funding fit. Somebody out there knows where there’s money for this important work.

   Running PEERS was the toughest job I’ve ever had, and there were lots of times when I’d be  crying in the car on the way home. That was definitely a first for me. But there were many moments of something akin to bliss, too, where I would look around at all these caring people trying to pull each other through and just see all the love and optimism in that work.

   What a pleasure it has been to stay connected with so many of my PEERS friends for nine years now, and to see the tremendous changes they have brought about in their own lives and those of others who they’ve since reached out to. And I’m very happy that the PEERS gang still thinks of me when a newsletter needs doing, because that tells me that the bond goes both ways.

   Please keep the buzz going about this issue. Keep the media comments and the emails circulating. May the office phones of our MLAs and MPs ring incessantly with demands to do something about this unacceptable loss of services.

Stumbling into a micro-organismatic adventure

 

  There are days when the frustrations of a new work culture pile up on me. And then there are days like the one I had this week, when it’s all just a total blast.

    The occasion was a workshop in a neighbouring community to demonstrate how to make two kinds of organic fertilizers. I like the hands-on workshops anyway – always interesting, loads of picture-taking opportunities – but looked forward to this one in particular because a couple of campesinos I always enjoy talking with were going to be there.

    Workshop days virtually always start with having to load heavy things into the truck and then drive around looking for some piece of equipment or fertilizer ingredient that we don’t have. The slow starts used to drive me crazy, but as time passes I've grown to like them. Instead of sitting tensely in the truck waiting for my workmate to return from his or her chores, I do a little wandering, maybe shoot a little video (my current obsession).

    Eventually, off we go, in this case to the house in Sesesmil II where the workshop was going to take place. But before we could get started, the two coffee producers who I really like had to hike into the woods to gather two sacks of a naturally occurring microbe known here as microorganismo de montaña. My co-worker suggested I go with the men – Don Candelario Hernandez and Don Alfredo Morales - in order to get video of the process.

    We’re going way up there, Don Alfredo told me, pointing high into the hills. I laughed, thinking he was joking. He wasn't.

    Within minutes of starting out, I regretted my choice of shoes that day: Sandals, although at least they had some grip. I would later come to regret my lack of insect repellent as well, and my folly at bringing my purse along. It swung jauntily on my shoulder as I slogged through creeks, over slippery rock and mud, then up what had to be a 75-degree, heavily forested slope.

    I slid, slipped and fell several times on the side of that mountain. Fortunately, it was slow-motion falling that left plenty of time for grabbing a branch on the way past, and I appreciated that the men I was with just acted like my tumbles were part of the adventure. By the time we got back to the house a couple of hours later, my purse and I were covered in mud, I was nursing a bruised hip, and my cute little sandals were caked in dirt and bits of dead leaf.

    This is not to suggest that I was unhappy with any of that, however. Even after a year and a half of doing this work, it’s still a treat to be able to head into the lush Honduran hills with people who know their way around. I marvel at their machete magic, at the way they fashion a glass out of a big leaf to scoop up creek water for a drink. Scrambling up a crazy incline to dig under rotting leaves for pockets of a mysterious microorganism would not be an invitation I’d jump at, but maybe that’s why I like my work adventures so much: I end up doing things I’d never have done otherwise.

    And how cool is it to watch these guys collecting this microorganism (picture bits of white fungus-like stuff, which in nature helps rot dead leaves) and thinking that I just might be enjoying the benefits of their work one day while sipping my morning cup of coffee? I come from a land where there’s a lot of talk about organic processes, of getting back to the land and doing things the natural way. But these guys are living it.

    Want to try your own microorganism fertilizer? Here’s the recipe, presuming you have access to a tropical forested mountain to get started: Two sacks of microorganism de montaña; 1 quintal (45 kilos) of rice semolina; and 4 litres of molasses diluted in enough water to ensure the mix ends up uniformly damp but not wet. Pack it all into a big barrel – pounding it down as you go to remove air – and seal it tight for 15 to 20 days. Dilute a half a kilo of the mix in 15 litres of water for a fine organic foliar spray.

    But of course, the fun all happens on the side of the mountain. Video to follow.